Cold Hard Truth: Learning From Dragons Den’s Kevin O’Leary On Business, Money And Life Part 6

September 23, 2011

All businesses who get a verbal agreement for a deal while on the Dragon’s Den show (televised or not) are subject to due diligence to ensure everything they said during their pitch was true and that there wasn’t anything not revealed to the Dragons or their accountants and lawyers.  According to O’Leary “miraculously, JobLoft breezed through the due-diligence process”.  What followed was one of the most dramatic events ever in any reality TV show in the US or Canada.

“We got ready to cut them the check for $200,000, and booked the handover shoot to take place in Robert Herjavec’s office … After we settled in around a massive board table, we soon discovered that the students had been receiving advice from a behind-the-scenes player – their business professor (at Ryerson University).  He not only sat on the board of JobLoft, but had some definite opinions about how we planned to market the website and who it’s intended audience was.” – From Cold Hard Truth

Because he was there at the meeting I’ll quote a few recollections about this meeting from Robert Herjavec as remembered in his autobiography “Driven: How To Succeed In Business And In Life”, a great book I’ve previously reviewed in my blog:

“For the first few minutes, the professor stood aside, watching and listening with an expression that suggested he was suffering from indigestion.  Finally, as I finished reviewing the deal with the young men who had pitched JobLoft to us, the professor barked an objection.  “I don’t like the business plan,” he said, and launched into a critique of the strategy we had just agreed upon.

Well, all right.  A business plan deserves to be examined from every angle before implementing it, and we listed to the professor’s objections, most of them dealing with our proposed strategy to target employers over prospective hires.  When we expressed disagreement with his concerns, the professor began questioning our academic credentials.

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Tags: angel, capital, den, Dragon, investor, shark, startup, tank, venture